Date: Fri 14-Feb-1997

Publication: Bee

Author: DOTTIE

Quick Words:

schools-art-Wesley-Learning

Full Text:

Children's Refrigerator Art Mimics The Masters

(with photos)

BY DOROTHY EVANS

Consider children's artwork.

Doesn't that fabulously colorful picture that your son painted of his back

yard in muddy browns and greens remind you of something you have seen before?

Think back to your college art appreciation class and Vincent Van Gogh. Van

Gogh loved color. He didn't care if his stars looked like suns or his trees

seemed to be dancing. Neither do most children.

Or try it the other way around.

The last time you spent a Sunday afternoon in New York's Modern Museum of Art

or at the Guggenheim Museum and you passed by a giant Jackson Pollack, were

you reminded of the way your kitchen floor looked just after Christmas, when

your child tried out the new paint set from Aunt Martha?

There is no getting around it: Children's art and the work of certain fine

artists shares something important. Call it exuberance and primitive power, if

you will.

An Artistic Experiment

Two kindergarten teachers at the Wesley Learning Center recently based a

classroom art project on the affinity between children and the childlike art

of certain fine artists.

Doing so, the two women proved that at a very basic level, even kindergartners

aren't too young to understand what the fine artists might be trying to

express.

If you want to be convinced, visit the Wesley Learning Center at 92 Church

Hill Road and look at the paintings hung in the hallway outside kindergarten

teacher Randi Rote's classroom.

Mrs Rote's teaching assistant, Theresa Hempstead, had taken an art history

course not long ago and the two women had been discussing how they might

incorporate fine art into their curriculum.

Would their 13 students take an interest in the lives of artists who lived

before they were born, possibly in another country and another culture?

Would they be able to "relate" to those artists' works, and could the Wesley

kindergartners create their own artwork in those styles?

To find out, Mrs Rote and Mrs Hempstead showed the children many paintings by

several modern American and European artists, well-known impressionist and

abstract expressionist masters such as Monet, Van Gogh, Munch, Pollack and

early Picasso.

They told the children a little about the artists' lives and then asked them

to create their own pictures, copying what they saw.

Expressing Themselves

With Paint

When the paintings were finished, Mrs Rote hung them as though this were a

real museum exhibit.

"It was a great success. The children dove right in and did their best. We

were going to take this exhibit down, but decided to show it off a little

longer," Mrs Rote said recently.

It wasn't hard to see which artist had most inspired the children. It had to

be the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollack.

Working outside in a "safe place," the children created one huge

paint-splattered masterpiece, rendered in bright primary colors of red, blue

and yellow.

"We walked, and we splattered, and I had no problem at all explaining to them

what to do!" Mrs Rote laughed.

They also seemed to identify readily with Picasso, especially his "Blue

Period" when he concentrated on simple, expressive drawings of the human

figure, painted in shades of blue.

"With Van Gogh, we tried using cornstarch to thicken the paint, just to get

that texture," Mrs Rote said.

The kindergartners' most dramatic paintings were done in the style of German

expressionist Edvard Munch, and Mrs Rote discovered finger paint seemed to

work best. A very recognizable picture of "The Scream" by one student featured

a huge head with mouth wide open, yelling.

Mrs Rote said she had a lot of fun hanging the exhibit and tried to make it as

much like a real museum show as possible.

One place in the middle of the wall had been left empty, and Mrs Rote placed a

simple sign with block lettering that stated: "On Temporary Loan To The

Metropolitan Museum Of Art."